Dentist.Com®

Research by Darrell Pruitt, DDS

Do you want to see how easily the ADA accepts being jerked around by Aetna year after year? Our leaders celebrated the collaboration yesterday with a joyful article that was posted in the ADA News (with no byline).

Here is the opening sentence: “Explanation of benefit language reported as problematic by dental offices was among the issues that the ADA Aetna Advisory Committee sorted out during the past four years.”

Four years? Really? Incredibly, that sounds even less efficient than the Texas Dental Association’s “Town Hall” meetings concerning workforce issues – also a difficult and tedious multi-year task, rendered next to irrelevant by a rapidly changing healthcare market.

So, now that all those EOB language problems have been solved, how long will it take for clever actuarial specialists at Aetna to create even trickier hoops that will take four more years of “cooperative” meetings? It is obviously difficult for the ADA to negotiate from a position of power when Aetna easily creates deceptive hoops out of thin air. I think Aetna actually invented “bundling” during a business retreat in upstate New York in the ‘80s. The trick must be at least twenty years old, yet the ADA is still fighting it.  Incredible.

I don’t want to brag, but if this is the best the ADA has to offer, even I can think up very cheap, but clever ways to convince insurance companies that their free ride through ADA Headquarters is so over. For example, just to quickly get their undivided attention, as well as an unprecedented level of respect for the dentists who treat their clients, I would strategically float a balloon about an upcoming widespread survey of dentists’ opinions of dental insurance companies.

If the survey of dentists were more than a simple rumor, I estimate it would take about five weeks to complete, start to finish. It could be completed long before the national ADA convention in San Antonio this fall.

Who would be interested in the results of such a survey? Show me an employer who if given a real selection, will choose the most despised dental insurance plan on the market.

Without transparency, there is no accountability. Darrell Pruitt DDS